Monday, February 25, 2013

Lemonade on Shabbat

Shabbat 143b through 145a addresses sehitah, the prohibition against squeezing on Shabbat. This came up on this blog once before.

The posekim debate how
this prohibition relates to making lemonade. At first glance, you might
think that making lemonade is a straightforward example of squeezing.
But God forbid that lemonade should be asur on Shabbat!

First, here are the basics that most rishonim
learn from the give-and-take on these pages of Gemara. (It happens to be
a relatively challenging give-and-take to follow, which is kind of unfair to Daf
Yomi learners on Purim weekend.) There are three type of fruit: grapes
and olives, which may not be squeezed mide-orayta; "tutim ve-rimonim," fruits which are commonly squeezed for juice, and may not be squeezed mide-rabbanan; and other fruits, which may be squeezed lekha-tehillah. That's most rishonim, including the Rif, Rambam, Semag and Rosh. and most Rashi, Tosafot, and the Semak are mahmir with that last one, and only allow squeezing a fruit if you do so to sweeten the fruit.

The Gemara also distinguishes between
squeezing fruit into a dish or into a bowl. When squeezing into a dish
of food, the juice never gets a status of liquid, so there is no
violation of sehitah.

So as for lemons, it would seem that in a place where people commonly make lemonade, squeezing the lemons would be forbidden mide-rabbanan. But the Beit Yosef, OH 320:6(a), finds that this isn't the case:

The Jews in Egypt made lemonade all the
time, and they couldn't be wrong. The Beit Yosef finds two ways to
justify this. One is that sehitah is only a problem when the
juice is drunk straight, without mixing it with other liquids. Another
is that the prohibition is only when the juice is squeezed into an empty
glass, but squeezing the juice into the sugar or water is okay.

It seems like both these leniencies are innovations of the Beit Yosef,
based on the common practice in Egypt. The Gemara never qualified what
you do with the juice once you squeeze it as juice, and we never before
had a hetter for squeezing juice into water. So you can add this se'if to the "interesting phenomena of the halakhic process" file.

After all that effort—and I just quoted the most relevant snippet of the Beit Yosef from that se'if—here is the entirety of Shulhan Arukh OH 320:6:

מותר לסחוט לימוני"ש.

Squeezing lemons is permitted.

Thank goodness! But it gets complicated again in the later posekim, with my thanks to Penei Shabbat for the references.

The Mishnah Berurah writes on this se'if that because lemon juice is a common product today, we should rely on the hetter of squeezing directly into food:

Rav Ovadiah Yosef disputes the Mishneh Berurah in Leviyyat Hen
(57), saying that lemon juice doesn't change the status of lemons,
because no one drinks lemon juice straight. Sephardim may therefore
squeeze lemons any way they please. I haven't seen the Leviyyat Hen inside, but it sounds like he's basing this argument on the first leniency of the Beit Yosef. The Kaf ha-Hayyim (36), Arukh ha-Shulhan (17), and Eglei Tal (dash 16) all pasken similarly that the blanket hetter of the Shulhan Arukh still stands.

The Hazon Ish (56:30) is the toughest of all.
Squeezing into sugar isn't good enough, because your intention is still
to make that into a drink; the hetter of le-tokh okhel is only when the end product will also be food. No lemonade for you. The Ketsot ha-Shulhan (126) agrees. I have to say that this makes sense logically in terms of what le-tokh okhel means, but it is still a hiddush and goes way beyond the precedent of the Shulhan Arukh.

So, bottom line? If you drink lemonade, you probably buy it ready-made from the store, so this post was entirely academic.